This invention generally relates to a stabilized equipment support and a method of balancing the same and, more particularly, to supporting ultra-lightweight cameras or other motion-sensitive equipment to isolate such equipment from unwanted motion during use.
Still picture and motion picture (video) cameras have, at some time during their use, been held by a human operator whose inherent instability tended to produce blurred still and moving images. The center of gravity laid within the camera and, by holding the camera at its exterior surface, the operator's inevitable unsteady hand motions exerted forces in directions effectively tangential to the camera's center of gravity, thereby resulting in undesirable motions of the camera along the pan and/or tilt and/or roll axes.
One approach to solving such motion problems was to mount the camera on pods, e.g., monopods or tripods. Another approach was to mount the camera on shoulder mounts and body braces to secure the camera to the operator's body. However, neither of these approaches were altogether satisfactory when the camera operator was ambulatory.
As exemplified by U.S. Pat. No. 5,098,182; U.S. Pat. No. 5,229,798; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,579,071, a more effective approach employed an equipoising camera support that statically and/or dynamically isolated the camera from both angular and spatial motions, thereby producing stable images even when the camera operator was ambulatory. Such equipoising supports have become standard tools in the still and video camera industries.
However, as satisfactory as such equipoising supports have been, they were primarily designed to support relatively large and heavy still and video cameras, weighing on the order of 10 pounds and much more. It was discovered that as the weight of the camera increased, the stability of the resulting image also tended to increase. Hence, it was believed that the lighter the camera, the less useful such an equipoising support would be.
Nevertheless, camera technology evolved towards miniaturization and lighter cameras. A full-sized consumer video device weighing about 5.5 pounds (i.e., the original “CamCorder”) contained a camera and a recorder and was designed to rest on the shoulder of the operator, and was followed over the years by more compact and ever lighter devices weighing on the order of 2.6 pounds and, hence, were entirely hand-supported. In recent years, ultra-lightweight cameras (less than two pounds), such as web cameras, weighing less than one pound have been developed, and the current ultra-lightweight cameras are so compact and light that they have even been incorporated into other devices, such as cellular phones weighing on the order of five ounces. In addition to the traditional unsteadiness of a handheld camera, these handheld devices were being operated by amateur photographers, still further resulting in unstable and often unacceptable still and video images, especially during ambulatory operation.
Efforts have been made to respond to the motion problem aggravated by ever lighter and lighter cameras, by providing miniature versions of many of the traditional camera supports, e.g., shoulder mounts, body braces and pods, that have been used in connection with the heavier commercial camera equipment used by professionals. Despite the bias against its use for light cameras, a miniaturized equipoising support having a bottom counterweight mounted below an overhead camera has also been tried. However, in practice, the counterweight was often too light, or too close to the overhead camera, and the resulting support was imbalanced. To correct such weight imbalances, the art proposed, e.g., in U.S. Pat. No. 5,098,182, to mount small weights either on the lower counterweight, or on the camera itself. However, attaching such small weights to the counterweight made the equipoising support bottom heavy, and attaching such small weights to each camera was a cumbersome, laborious balancing procedure, typically performed while holding the support in one's unsteady and fatigued hand. In any event, there was always the possibility that the attached weights could shift in position, or even become detached, when the camera operator was ambulatory.
Thus, these various approaches have failed to effectively and satisfactorily eliminate the problems of instability encountered in connection with operation of the ever-lighter, digital, still and motion, cameras that have been developed, and it therefore is desirable to furnish a stabilized equipment support particularly well suited to the special requirements of ultra-lightweight, handheld, digital cameras, particularly consumer-operated video cameras and like devices, e.g., those incorporated into cellular telephones. It is also desirable to improve the balancing procedure to avoid the instability and unsteadiness of one's hand that prevents an accurate balance from being obtained, and to avoid the shifting and detachment of separate weights arranged on the support.